Three Nations, Three Dates

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The United Kingdom did not devolve government all at once, and the gaps between when it did tell their own story. Northern Ireland was first, in 1921, under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, decades before any comparable body existed for Scotland or Wales. Scotland and Wales had to wait until September 1997, when referendums in both nations approved the creation of a Scottish Parliament and what was then a Welsh Assembly, with the London Assembly following in 1998; the bodies themselves were established between 1998 and 1999. The distance between 1921 and 1997 is not an accident of scheduling, it reflects three separate political histories arriving at devolution on three separate timelines. Even after 1997, the settlement kept moving: when Scottish voters rejected independence in the 2014 referendum, the response was not to freeze devolution where it stood but to extend it, and further powers moved to the Scottish Parliament under the Scotland Act 2016. Each stage was a fresh act of the Westminster Parliament, which is the point the whole timeline illustrates: every one of these transfers was a grant that could, in law, be given further, or in principle taken back, by the body that made it.